Luzon at War: Contradictions in Philippine Society, 1898-1902

Copyright to this digital edition © 2015 by

Milagros Camayon Guerrero

and Anvil Publishing, Inc.

Introduction copyright © Vicente L. Rafael

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be

reproduced in any form or by

any means without the written

approval of the copyright owners.

Published and exclusively distributed by

Anvil Publishing, Inc.

7th Floor Quad Alpha Centrum

125 Pioneer Street, Mandaluyong City

1550 Philippines

Phones: 477-4752, 477-4755 to 57

Fax: 747-1622

E-mail: marketing@anvilpublishing.com

sales@anvilpublishing.com

Book design: Robbie Villegas (cover) and Jo B. Pantorillo (interior)

ISBN 9789712732560 (e-book)

Version 1.0.1

PREFACE

In 1958, the United States Government returned to the Philippines nearly three tons of material documents from the 1896 revolution to the March 1901 surrender of Emilio Aguinaldo, president of the Malolos Republic. They were collectively called Philippine Insurgent Records (PIR). Prior to their return, the U, S. National Archives microfilmed all these documents, which amounted to 643 rolls of film. These documents were taken from forces surrendering to the American Army, removed from government buildings and private houses, or extricated from corpses that lay unburied in the battlefield. Also captured were wagons of official records that accompanied Aguinaldo’s escape from Malolos thence to Cabanatuan and finally to Palanan, Isabela. They run the gamut of important official documents of the Malolos Republic to correspondences from municipalities and provinces,letters and numerous records from private citizens to hundreds of curious small bits of paper with the single word vale or promissory note for salaries to be redeemed, taken from the bodies of soldiers, dead and alive. John Rogers Meigs Taylor of the U. S. 14th Infantry became the custodian of this unusual cache of captured documents.

They are now deposited in the Rare Books and Manuscript Section at the Philippine National Library. Officials of the Library, mindful of the true nature of the materials, gave the archive a new name: Philippine Revolutionary Papers (PRR). To this day, however, the librarians at the desk call them Insurgent Records, indicating that as custodians of such an important archive they do not even understand the value of the records in their care. Most of these documents, however, were neither insurgent nor revolutionary, but papers of the officials of the Malolos Republic, surprising even themselves, according to Emilio Aguinaldo, that they knew how to run a government.

Upon his return to the United States, Captain Taylor of the U. S. 14th Infantry was assigned to the newly established Bureau of Insular Affairs to collate, organize, transcribe, translate, and annotate these materials, presumably for the guidance of the U. S. government in formulating policy regarding the new colony. The U. S. Army approved his project for the purpose of understanding the intricacies of insurgency in what later scholars would call the first Vietnam. He began this arduous task in 1902 and finished it in 1906. He had succeeded in putting together what he called Selected Documents—more than 12,000 items—that formed the basis of a five-volume work, two of which were his historical narrative. This he asserts was a truthful version of the Philippine Revolution and the Filipino-American War which he, of course, called an insurrection. The pile of materials he could not make heads or tails of, he labelled Old Series or New Series, which from a cursory inspection is also a treasure trove not so much for an understanding of the war but for the social and cultural history of the time.

I have pointed out in Chapter 1 that his cavalier treatment of the Filipinos contributed to the suppression of his work. But apparently, according to John Morgan Gates and William Farrel, some politics was also involved in the final decision to throw his work to the dustbin. James LeRoy was also working on the American conquest of the Philippines and he must have been absolutely flabbergasted that here was a work truly superior to his manuscripts. James LeRoy’s two-volume work, The Americans in the Philippines, published in 1913, was even more vituperative and condescending (to) the Filipinos. But he got the support of some officials in the Bureau of Insular Affairs where Taylor was also posted as military historian. Taylor’s two-volume history was accompanied by a three-volume compilation of documents which today are extremely useful to the mindful researcher, as this important period in our history is rapidly fading from our collective memory.

LeRoy had worked as a member of the staff of William Howard Taft in the Philippines and always had the latter’s ear. LeRoy objected to the publication; Secretary of War Taft, himself, objected to Taylor’s work as it could be used by the Democratic opposition which had opposed America’s adventure in the Philippines. His curt reply to Taylor that the five volumes needed corrections must have confused the author. Until the 1930s, the latter sought permission for the publication of his work, but the galley proofs lay entombed and forgotten in the Bureau of Insular Affairs. In truth, Taft feared Taylor’s work as it considerably was revelatory of the nature of the Filipino elite. Taylor’s language and analysis would embarrass and insult them and endanger the warm alliance that had been built with the Americans. The historical record shows that the Americans did not seek to obtain their collaboration. The Filipino elite applauded America’s victory over the Filipinos and they presented themselves as willing and able cogs in the machine that the Americans were set to establish. Even while still members of the Malolos Congress, they were already unabashedly enthusiastic supporters of, and were therefore important and indispensable tools for, American colonization. Indeed, as the brilliant work of Norman Owen, Compadre Colonialism has shown, if this elite had not existed, the Americans would have created one themselves.

In 1971, when the Eugenio Lopez Foundation decided to publish Taylor’s suppressed The Philippine Insurrection Against the United States, A Compilation of Notes and Introduction, the late Don Eugenio Lopez and his son, Oscar Lopez, probably did not know that they were bequeathing to the Filipinos a precious legacy, a key to understanding an important period in their political and cultural history and make some sense of that massive archives that lay behind his work. There were only three sets of galley proofs, one in the possession of the Lopez Museum, and a second set, safe in the United States National Archives in Washington, D.C, within the Bureau of Insular Affairs Records. A third set has not been located. A year before I left the Philippines to undertake doctoral studies at the University of Michigan, I was appointed copy editor to go through the galley proofs, along with two other young faculty members at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, whose identities I have never found out. For my part, I was gifted by the Lopez Memorial Museum a set of uncut volumes, now out of print and quite rare, which became my portal to Microscopy 254, composed of 643 reels of microfilm records of the archive mentioned above.

To be awed by the scope of Taylor’s work, for example, the systematic ordering of the documents on the MalolosRepublic, despite his prejudice against the Filipinos, is to acknowledge the power—and the poverty—of written records. Outside of these materials, our history of the Filipino-American War might have been very very sparse indeed. There would not have been a parchment curtain to part, to use the words of William Henry Scott, to disclose the many truths about the Filipino-American War. Had they remained in the Philippines, they would have rotted very quickly or subjected to deliberate wanton destruction. Many documents, whose authors perjured themselves and wrote slanderous remarks against presumed and actual allies and enemies, or had in them expressions of outright opportunism among many members of the elite that gathered round Aguinaldo in Malolos, were lost, intentionally destroyed, or sold to antique collectors for the high commercial value of the papers and the stamps affixed on them.

In Malolos, Aguinaldo stood at the pinnacle of power. There is nothing in his memoir that hints at a realization that even for a few months, as president of the Republic, he was heir to all of the power and authority exercised by the Spanish governor-generals, who by short turnos, ruled the colony for more than three centuries. If one were not privy to the origins of the laws, notices, and circulars one might have thought that Aguinaldo was truly a prodigious man. In truth, Mabini wrote all the laws and administrative measures that originated from the republican capital. All of the documents are in the handwriting of Mabini to which were affixed Aguinaldo’s signature. Mabini also penned the letters to President William McKinley as well as to the American generals who headed the U, S. expeditionary forces to the Philippines. The altercations between different factions in the government did not take place in Congress but in the house that Aguinaldo and Mabini shared. The latter sat by his side, offering advice to the President and calming the violent aggressiveness of his cabinet, a gentle image offered by Epy Quizon in the brilliantly crafted film by Jerrold Tarog, Heneral Luna: Bayan o Sarili?, currently playing in the cinemas [06 September 2015]. Day after day, the handicapped Mabini handed over to the president the measures necessary for the governance of the new nation, usually written in scholarly Spanish but mercifully accompanied by a translation in Tagalog, because Aguinaldo did not really read Spanish.

As president, Aguinaldo followed the paternalistic tendencies so entrenched in the colonial government he was heir to. As head of a centralized administration, Aguinaldo received massive correspondence that would have boggled even the most energetic leader and a steady stream of official and unofficial visitors interested in receiving favors, big and small—from the noble plans to establish the Literary University of the Philippines, to long-range economic plans to improve agriculture, particularly in the cultivation of rice and sugar, from the development of coasting trade to the future plans for foreign commerce. To his office went matters like requests for permits to continue the operation of opium stores and the sale of naipes (playing cards) to complaints about women of ill-repute parlaying their trade in some streets of Manila. There were numerous complaints about the continuation of taxes, like the Spaniards did in their day. And while his own province of Cavite may already be too distant from the capital, he would receive reports of quarrels between Generals Miguel Malvar and Mariano Noriel, former allies in the conspiracy against Katipunan supremo and first Katagalugan President Andres Bonifacio. Outside Malolos, open insubordination was rife because of the military’s regionalistic tendencies, particularly the Kawit regiment which refused to recognize the authority of General Antonio Luna, whom Aguinaldo had designated as military chief of all Philippine troops. This regiment was in fact responsible for the murder of General Luna. In other provinces, the army was ruthless and committed many atrocities, largely because of lack of training and little support for provisions from the central government. The president for his part did not prosecute officers who were allies and comprovincianos even if clearly guilty of mutiny and violation of military laws. He did not listen to the counsel of close friends who recognized the superiority of the American troops and asked repeatedly for the commencement of guerrilla warfare. Teodoro Sandico, in particular, proposed the re-establishment and reorganization of the Katipunan as a clandestine support group to the Philippine Army. It is interesting to note, however, that the generals associated with Bonifacio’s Katipunan had all but disappeared from the historical record during this period. The country’s economic elite held him at arm’s length. They organized the Malolos Congress, less to create laws for the country, but to establish a cordon sanitaire around the president and ensure his captivity. Fearful of the veritable military oligarchy around the president, these elements, in the words of Felipe Calderon, needed to be neutralized. It must be pointed out, however, that the military leaders were themselves members of the elite, foremost of whom were Antonio Luna, Vicente Lukban, Jose Alejandrino and Francisco Makabulos Soliman. To be sure, they had become warlords in the provinces where they operated, particularly because they have had to support their armies with their own resources. The inordinate amount of time spent on debates to ensure that the separation of Church and State be a permanent proviso in the constitution—so totally unnecessary in the pursuit of war against the United States—could have been spent for the members of Congress to rally to war the people in their respective provinces. Cooling their heels in Malolos might have been a way of biding their time until the Americans had finally defeated the Republic and Aguinaldo slain or captured. Aguinaldo was confined to Malolos, while the members of Congress could travel back and forth to Manila, sometimes to attend parties hosted by American military officials. One gets a sense of this sentiment when as early as September 1898, a group of wealthy Filipinos, headed by Jose Basa from Cavite, congratulated the Americans on the capture of Manila, asserting that since the Filipino soil had been soaked with American blood, the Islands must remain American.

This thin volume, Luzon at War, highlights the strength and durability of the Filipino elite. It would have been well nigh impossible for the reconstruction and reorganization of the administration of the provinces and municipalities if the elites at these levels were not already in place. The Aguinaldo government did not have the force as well as instruments to enforce political reorganization on those who might have objected. These local elites proceeded from the natural alliance between the wealthy Filipinos (indio, sangley mestizo and Spanish mestizo) and the Spanish colonial administrators. Thus those leaders who believed in the logic and morality of war with the United States supported Malolos and used their own resources and led their own people to fight their just war and those that did not, however, did not receive any sanctions from the central government. There were instances, as the war dragged on and the American forces had moved forward throughout much of Luzon, when a municipal president was both a Malolos republican and an Americanista.

The topmost level of the elite structure, the national ilustrados, who had surrounded Aguinaldo effectively in Malolos, completed the latter’s captivity with two projects which caused Aguinaldo to vacillate and eventually completely affirm the elite to the great objection of Mabini. These were the National Loan Bill and a congressional act which created a foreign loan to be paid from the coffers of the government. These two acts would establish a Board of Treasury that would supervise the contributions to the war effort as well as the payment of the foreign loan. For a period of twenty years or so, the creditors of the loan and the collectors would come from the national elite. Only the victory of the Americans prevented their implementation. In other words, by two simple acts that broadly assert their generosity and seeming concern for the republic, the national elite had hit at the nerve center of the administration and established themselves as the real owners of the government. In the context of contemporary manipulation of public funds in our century, in the much denounced pork barrel funds, i.e., the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) and the Development Acceleration Program (DAP) which had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the National Loan Bill and the Foreign Loan Bill adopted in Malolos upon closer scrutiny, seem more callous and unconscionable. Jose Rizal said earlier that a numerous educated class, both in the archipelago and outside it, must now be reckoned with,… This educated elite grows steadily. It is in continuous contact with the rest of the population. If it is no more than the brains of the nation, it will become in a few years its whole nervous system. In a knowing that only Rizal possessed, among the great men of our country, he ended his remark thus: Then we shall see what it will do. They gained more power on their own terms during the war and the first decade of the twentieth century. And if we were to examine how this power grew from the beginning of the Spanish conquest, conveniently dismissed in our history textbooks and conveniently elided by Professor Teodoro Agoncillo who said that the indios’ role during the Spanish period was as mere rowers in the many expeditions sent to the South, we may be surprised from sources in another massive archive in Seville, Spain, that the opening up ( to open, abrir ) of much of Luzon was due to the alliances—willingly contracted—between the leaders of various chiefdoms of Manila, Bulacan, and Pampanga and the Spaniards in the latter’s northward advance to the Ilocos Region and the Cordillera. Further growth of the elite was assured by economic developments in the nineteenth century, when there were many opportunities for advancement that only those who had already been in business for quite some time (as datus turned into caciques and hacendados turned into merchants). At a critical juncture in Philippine history, power was transferred from Spanish to ilustrado hands, The Malolos Republic was a momentary block to their goals; in fact it was deemed a great project mainly because of their participation in it. Thus we may understand Aguinaldo’s fear of them as much as Taft’s hesitation to cross their path.

David Joel Steinberg acknowledges in his The Philippines: A Singular and A Plural Book that the period of the Katipunan Revolution and the Malolos Republic was an era of violent discontinuity, which he sees as part of the ongoing process of national unification and socio-economic development that continues until today. By looking at the triumph of the elite, at all levels, however, we are also constrained to look at the cleavages in Philippine society. Attending and accompanying the rise to power of the elite was the exploitation of the lower classes not only by the Spaniards but also by their agents, none other than the elite. Able to articulate in the language of the colonizer, they focused only on their complaints and conveniently ignored the glaring social inequality brought about by their own rise to power. The agents of tax collections and recruitment of forced labor and the usurpation of land by the friar corporations could not be done without their collusion. In their subsequent rendering of this story, the victimization of the lower classes melded with their own presumed exploitation. There are many instances of this development in the nineteenth century, and because Filipino historians of the past century have been guided by their foreign mentors, the students of today are content with received knowledge that is utterly inadequate to make sense of the land hunger of small farmers and independent cultivators turned into peasants or kasama.

In the chapter on the Peasants in the Revolution, the restiveness of the peasants was revealed during the Filipino-American War in the rise of various organizations, admittedly with millenarian orientations. The Aguinaldo government was one with the elite in their mistrust of the peasantry who saw the agents of the Malolos Republic, principally the military elements as exploitative as the Spaniards (read native agents–caciques and hacendados and their overseers representing the Crown) of the past colonial regime. The republic’s prejudice against the awakened peasantry can be seen in the labels used against the latter: thieves and cutthroats, bad elements (gentes de mal vivir), bandits, and fanatics. After the demise of the republic, the American colonial government and the ilustrado policy makers that peopled this new regime, perpetuated this perspective. The Aguinaldo government could not possibly address the issues raised by the awakening peasantry. He was of like mind with the elite, as evidenced by his plan to take a large piece of land in the Cagayan Valley, which, in the absence of a cadastral and population survey, even if the plan figured only in his dream, was tantamount to land grabbing.

The national elite, growing and expanding, continues in its untrammelled acquisition of power and influence. The dominant familism in every province which we encountered during the war against the United States continues to assert and insinuate itself in practically every sector of Philippine society, culture, and economy. Feeble and token are attempts of some legislators to do away or at least diminish the harmful effects of political dynasties. The peasants, for their part, show that they have not been entirely hypnotized or silenced by talks of benevolent government policy or outright military suppression. Violent although shortlived uprisings such as the Colorum and Sakdal revolts and organizations of peasant societies before the outbreak of World War II frightened those in power. From 1946 to the present, in the absence of social justice, they participated in the Huk Movement as well as in the various instruments of the New People’s Army. There is of course an escapist but more reasonable response, which is to leave the country as overseas Filipino workers and be hailed as new heroes while the revenue they have been sending to the Philippines continues to shore up the country’s economy.

Luzon at War, now published as a document, the book you intend to read right now, deals only with a very short period in our historical time. The cruel story/stories about us may serve to numb the mind and encourage amnesia. Surely, the Visayas at war—for there certainly was one during the same period—deserves a history of its own.

The past is a foreign country, says David Lowenthal, in his monumental work which carries the same title. They do things differently there. The drama of the past must not be played out in the future. But what if the narrative with the same features, now seemingly according to a master plot, continues into the present? And why so? I cannot even begin to answer my own questions.

MILAGROS C. GUERRERO

September 2015

Quezon City

INTRODUCTION

REVOLUTIONARY CONTRADICTIONS

By Vicente L. Rafael

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part… It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, that is, to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

I.

Over lunch at the Via Mare restaurant at the University of the Philippines campus about two summers ago, Mila Guerrero told me the story of how she came to write the book you’re holding in your hands. It began as her PhD dissertation at the University of Michigan in 1977. Several years earlier, she had received a scholarship to study in the United States. However, she could not leave without securing the permission of the Chair of the department. At that time, this was none other than the well-known historian, Teodoro Agoncillo, principle author of the most widely read textbook in the country’s colleges, History of the Filipino People.¹ Mila had served as his co-author starting with the third edition in 1970 until the seventh edition in 1986. Since Agoncillo was difficult to reach in his office, she had to wait for him to get out of his last class. She asked him if he would sign the forms that would allow her to leave for Ann Arbor. Agoncillo looked at her skeptically. He did not think it was necessary for Filipino students to go abroad to study history, especially their own. He wanted to know why she felt she had to go. Look at me, he said. I never had to study in the US. Mila responded, But sir, I am not as great as you. He signed the forms right there, then headed down to his waiting Mercedes Benz, and Mila got to go.²

Both the Philippines Mila left and the America that awaited her were in the midst of much turmoil. In the former, the First Quarter Storm in 1970 and the tide of student protests that followed were part of a growing sense of unease over the worsening economic and social conditions during the second Marcos term. In the US, racial strife and cultural uprisings were sweeping through much of America’s major cities even as an unwinnable war was being waged in Southeast Asia. Mila had left the University of the Philippines that had become the nerve center of nationalist dissidence, culminating in the Diliman Commune of 1971, while the University of Michigan she came to had been at the forefront of some of the most radical student organizing. The first anti-war teach-ins were held there in 1964 and it was the birthplace of the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, which had led massive free speech demonstrations and was involved in other social movements of that time. Memories were still fresh of student occupations across many US campuses. The growing anti-war movement brought attention not only to the war in Vietnam but also to its precursor, the Filipino-American War. Indeed, many activists and students quickly grasped the connection between these two imperialist wars and the protracted guerilla resistances they incited. By the time Mila arrived in Ann Arbor in the fall of 1972, Richard Nixon had already resigned from the presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal. A month later, Marcos declared Martial Law, as the Philippine State, replaying the contradictions of the First Republic in Malolos, launched a long war against its own people.

Mila’s sojourn to Ann Arbor in the 1970s occurred against a larger backdrop of postcolonial developments. She was part of a generation of post-war Filipino intellectuals and writers who were recipients of what we might think of as American Cold War largesse. Taking advantage of fellowships from Fulbright, Ford, SSRC-ACLS and Rockefeller, they came to study in the United States expecting to gain the technical and scholarly expertise they needed to return home and take up the task of national development. In that sense, they were following the well-worn paths traced by Filipino creoles, mestizos and indios who made up the ilustrados from the later nineteenth century, as well as the pensionados and other Filipino students of the early twentieth. Just as Mila was settling down in Ann Arbor, Samuel Tan had moved to Syracuse. Reynaldo Ileto, and earlier, Joel Rocamora, Nita Churchill, Roxy Lim and Belinda Aquino had been or were still at Cornell; Oscar Alfonso was at Chicago, Oscar Evangelista at Wisconsin; Leslie Bauzon at Duke; Edilberto C. de Jesus at Yale; and Walden Bello at Princeton and several others. They were preceded by a slightly older generation such as O.D. Corpuz (Illinois and Harvard), Cesar Majul (Cornell), Benito Legarda, Jr. (Georgetown and Harvard), Bienvenido Lumbera (Indiana) and the Jesuit Horacio de la Costa (Harvard). This generation of US-educated Filipinos (along with a handful who went instead to Western Europe, such as